Hold Those Paintings!

By Robert Hughes With Reporting By Massimo Calabresi/Vienna And Daniel S. Levy/New York

For the past couple of weeks the international museum world has been getting an increasing attack of the jitters over two works by the Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Portrait of Wally, 1912, and Dead City III, 1911, were part of a large fall show of Schiele's drawings and paintings at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, all on loan from the government-financed Leopold Foundation in Vienna. The two paintings have long been claimed by descendants of Viennese Jewish families from whom the Nazis stole them in the 1930s. Right at the end of the show--in fact only hours before the works were to be crated for return to Vienna--Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau took the unusual and high-handed step of hitting MOMA with a subpoena that froze the disputed Schieles in New York City until a criminal investigation had determined whose property they are.

This was greeted with outrage in Austria and dismay in the U.S. Austrian Culture Minister Elizabeth Gehrer called Morgenthau's intervention a "heavy blow to the international exchange of art" that "shakes the foundations of trust." It seemed particularly insulting that Morgenthau's office had behaved as though the present Austrian government, whose conduct in the restitution of art stolen by Nazis after the Anschluss has been impeccable, would stoop to the sort of cover-up deployed by Swiss bankers over their stocks of stolen Jewish gold.

The chief claimants to the paintings are Henry Bondi, 76, a biochemical engineer in Princeton, N.J., and Rita Reif, a semiretired arts reporter for the New York Times. Wally had belonged to Bondi's aunt, a Viennese art dealer named Lea Bondi Jaray. Shortly before she fled to London in 1938, it was seized from her by a Nazi art dealer; eventually it passed through the hands of the Austrian Gallery and ended up in the collection of Dr. Rudolf Leopold, an ophthalmologist and self-styled art historian and restorer whose Schiele collection is institutionalized today as the Leopold Foundation. Dead City was owned by a relative of Reif's, a Viennese writer-comedian named Fritz Grunbaum. Nazis confiscated it before sending him to die in Dachau. Its passage through the art market before Leopold bought it from a dealer is not fully clear.

Bondi and Reif had asked MOMA to keep the works in New York until the legal title to the pictures was clarified. "The museum," said Reif, "must make a moral determination on this." Exactly wrong: the museum's responsibility for moral issues stops with the works in its own collection. MOMA had a loan contract with the Leopold Foundation to return the works to Vienna as soon as the show closed. Such contracts are, of course, vital to the arrangement of institutional art loans. The free circulation of works of art among museums depends on them. "If we can't honor our contracts, it will have the iciest chilling effect on loans," MOMA's legal counsel, Stephen Clark, told the New York Times. "Who would lend, knowing that the pictures might not come back?"

The Holocaust Art Restitution Project, a group set up last fall in Washington to document Jewish cultural losses under Nazism, got into the act and started urging MOMA and its chairman, Ronald Lauder, not to return the paintings. (As it happens, Lauder was ambassador to Austria from 1986 to 1987 and is a notable Schiele collector.) In response the Leopold Foundation proposed that an international tribunal be set up to examine the Schieles' true ownership, and it pledged to comply with the tribunal's findings. Constance Lowenthal, director of the World Jewish Congress's Commission for Art Recovery (whose chairman is Lauder), said the foundation's offer was unique in her experience, since few owners of art with clouded title are apt to be so cooperative.

So why did Morgenthau step in? Dr. Klaus Schroder, the Leopold Museum's managing director, suspects that behind the D.A.'s subpoena lies the hand of New York's Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who is seeking support during this election year for his bill on property restitution to the heirs of the Holocaust, which passed the Senate in November and awaits House action. "It is of course political," said Schroder. He dismisses the Reif and Bondi claims as invalid, as the statute of limitations has expired, and vehemently defends Rudolf Leopold as a good-faith purchaser.

Whether anything but rhetorical heat and resentment will come out of this whole debacle remains to be seen. At worst it could do severe damage to the loan system on which museums depend, while adding very little to the principles of restitution of stolen property. But that's what can happen when grandstanding pols and D.A.s get in on emotionally supercharged issues that ought to be resolved with tact and studious neutrality.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Vienna and Daniel S. Levy/New York